Brown snake on campus!

We had a bit of excitement in the biology department today as a juvenile eastern brown snake (Pseudonaja textilis) paid our building a visit. It was first seen (not by me) just inside the building, but it made a quick retreat back outside.

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This little brown snake paid us a visit today.

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Our building's safety officer (in blue) evaluating the situation. In the background is the Banks Building, where I and about half the Department of Evolution, Ecology & Genetics have our offices.

We followed the snake until it hid in some bushes. We left it there in hopes that it will make its way back to some nearby bushland where it will be safe from mean people with long sticks. Hopefully we won't come to work tomorrow to find a squashed baby snake!

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The young brown snake found temporary shelter in a bush near our building.

Sorry for the poor quality of these pictures, but that's something to be expected from me photographing deadly snakes.

Taronga Zoo is displaying my dragons!

Two of the dragons we collected as part of my research are now in display at Taronga Zoo in Sydney! We collected the central netted dragon on Henbury Station in the Northern Territory in 2012 and the red-barred dragon on Mulgaria Station in South Australia in 2011. Both dragons are visible in the picture below. The central netted dragon is obvious, while the red-barred dragon is a little harder to find.

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Hot Canberra Sundays are for the birds

And now for an intermission in which a tiny bird hijacks my entire Sunday afternoon.

I was driving to fill up an ANU vehicle before returning it when I had to stop at a crosswalk to let a bouncing grey ball hop across the road. The bouncing grey ball turned out to be a fledgling noisy miner. 

I was very impressed with the consideration the bird showed by crossing at the crosswalk, so I pulled over and got out to help it the rest of the way across. It looked like it was putting in a lot of effort. The poor thing was so hot (it was 39 degrees Celsius in Canberra) that instead of fleeing it ran immediately into the shade underneath me.

I picked it up and placed it under a nearby tree. The tree was full of irate adult noisy miners, which I figured were the family of this little one. 

After filling up the vehicle I passed by the spot again, so I got out to check on the fledgling. It was almost exactly where I left it, which was unfortunate. However, it was still being fed and tended to by adult miners, which was fortunate.

I called Angus Kennedy, who is an experienced wildlife carer in the ACT. He suggested a little craft project. I'm posting this here so that if anyone finds a fledgling bird, they may also benefit from Angus's wisdom.

First, I needed to get supplies: a bucket, a hammer, a knife and some nails. I stabbed some holes in the bottom of the bucket to prevent flooding if it rains.

Then I arranged the inside of the bucket into something I supposed a fledgling bird would find comfortable.

Finally, I nailed the bucket into the side of the tree. I put it as high up as I could reach and in a spot I thought would be shady for the majority of the day.

I put the fledgling bird in the bucket and backed off to wait. I watched the adults land on the ground around the tree, searching. They eventually found the fledgling in the bucket due to its constant vocalisations, and after about ten minutes I left. Hopefully everything works out!

ACT Herp Group gets a new website

Angus Kennedy (see below) designed and supplied most of the pictures for this lovely website. He has recently created another beautiful website for the ACT Herpetological Association (ACTHA). They now have a wonderful news section that compiles all the herp-related news from the ACT region into one convenient place. Right now the top story is a crazy picture of a large eastern brown snake eating a slightly-less-large red-bellied black snake.

Angus Kennedy. Thurlga Station, South Australia, 2012. Photo by me, probably.

ACTHA is currently running Snakes Alive, a display of reptiles and amphibians at the Australian National Botanical Gardens. My two pet pythons are there, as are many critters from the ACT, around Australia, and even a few exotics! They also offer the opportunity to touch and hold some of the critters, should you so choose.

If you're a herp nut in the ACT (or around the ACT, they accept Queabeyaners) you should consider joining to meet other reptile enthusiasts around here and listen to interesting talks on local herps, herp keeping, and herp research.

Dragons by Habitat

Ctenophorus is far and away Australia's largest genus of dragons; the current count being 28 species. It keeps getting bigger, with the addition just last month of a new species, Ctenophorus mirrityana. These dragons were long thought to be Ctenophorus decresii, and admittedly they do look pretty similar. However, there are differences if you look close enough, as McLean et al. did. Also, as McLean et al. found once they did the genetics, it turns out that Ctenophorus mirrityana isn't even particularly closely related to Ctenophorus decresii. C. decresii is much more closely related to a very different looking lizard, Ctenophorus fionni.

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A tawny dragon,  Ctenophorus decresii, which looks like but is not particularly closely related to Ctenophorus mirrityana. near Burra, South Australia, 2011. Photo by Tobias Hayashi.

The genus just keeps expanding. Before Ctenophorus mirrityana, the last time species got added to Ctenophorus  was in 2008, when Melville et al. found four species of small, heath-dwelling lizards to be phylogenetically inside the Ctenophorus radiation. These four look nothing like what a Ctenophorus should look like, and don't really behave like a self-respecting Ctenophorus either. They are small, inconspicuous, pebble-mimicking lizards that aren't very fast and would rather crouch down and hope you don't see them than take off running. Any self-respecting Ctenophorus sits up proudly and doesn't care if you see it, because it knows it is faster than you. Well, it thinks it's faster than you.

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The Ctenophorus is not faster than me. I'm also pretty sneaky. Cameron's Corner, South Australia, 2011. Photo by Angus Kennedy.

Just one year before that, in 2007, a lizard species completely unknown to science was described from remote central Western Australia. It was found living on the surface of a salt lake, something Ctenophorus are famous for. This lizard turned out also to be a Ctenophorus  and was named Ctenophorus nguyarna. So in the past seven years, six species have been added to the Ctenophorus genus in three different instances. Not only that, but each instance was a different method of discovering a new species: species splitting, polyphyly, and discovery of completely new animals previously unknown to science.

Before all this, a long time ago (the 80's) Dr. Allen Greer noticed and wrote about the fact that Ctenophorus  dragons fall broadly into three categories: those that shelter in burrows, those that shelter under rocks, and those that shelter in vegetation. Thirty years later, Dr. Greer's designations still stand as a very useful way to divide up Australia's largest dragon genus. According to the most recent Ctenophorus phylogeny, there are two groups of everything. Two groups of burrowers, two groups of rock-dwellers, and two groups of vegetation-dwellers. 

The first group of vegetation-dwellers are the small, heath-dwelling lizards formerly of the genus Rankinia that were transferred into Ctenophorus in 2008 based on phylogenetics and some subtle morphological features. Phylogenetics be damned, I consider them interlopers and will have nothing more to do with them! Also, I've never seen one and I don't have any pictures of them. The other groups, however, I have plenty of pictures of, so I think I'll go through each group and put up some pictures of them and their very different habitats.